Catharsis Quotes

“Writing a memoir is a holistic method of learning and healing by placing responsibility for personal transformation on the spiritual authority of the self. Writing a person’s life story is useful to gain a comprehensive understanding regarding a person’s maturation, distinctive stages of personal development, and the influences provided by their family and society. The writing processes also serves as a catharsis for painful personal events that a person seeks to integrate into their transmuting being. Writing our personal story, we discover new dimensions of our being.”

“I literally grew up in drama. I used to watch drama - the catharsis of the play - then see drama at home.”

“Even in death, her mother was winning.”

“Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.”

“It's expected of novels that they should explain the world and create the illusion that things are ultimately logical and coherent. But that's not what I see around me. Often, events remain mysterious and unresolved, and our emotions reach no catharsis.”

“There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it.”

“How do you circumvent a mind bent upon lying to get away from the truth?”

“I think the live show is a different kind of catharsis. It's an event. It's supposed to be entertaining. To keep myself entertained, I like to play a rock n' roll show. I still kind of feel like I'm a rock n' roll musician anyway.”

“The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.”

“We are the directors of our own life, creating our own version of truth, which can be humorous, pleasurable, miserable, brutal, or stupid. Reconciling loss and misfortune can provide a sense of sublimity or catharsis.”

“A movie can and should have some real dissonance throughout - rage, heartache, tears, conflict, catharsis and all the other elements Aristotle demanded of a good story - but the chord has to be resolved.”

“I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.”

“Look, pain is there in the world, and there's catharsis through that. I feel like there's... a rapture, if we can get through it, if we can confront things.”

“It's not that we like sad movies that make us feel like, 'Oh, my God, what a bummer.' We like emotionally moving experiences. It's nothing new. It's catharsis. It goes back to the Greeks.”

“If you can get to be you, why can't I get to be me?”

“Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation.”

“Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines.”

“I have a very healthy relationship to my work, and I find that if a scene is working, no matter how intense it is, you have the catharsis on screen, and you can let it go. I think it's, if at the end of the day you feel like you haven't cracked it, that's when you go home and it's more difficult to switch off.”

“The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.”

“Sometimes what we call tragedy, at least in the theater, are really case histories. They're based on the central figure, and things happen to that person, and they're called tragedy because they're extremely sad. But tragedy always has a glorious thing happen at the end of it. That's what the catharsis is.”